Recording for Blue

"If you ever need a slide bouzouki, give me a shout," I said to Blue back around Christmas, when he was telling me about the new album he was recording.

I then promptly forgot all about it, as I say throwaway comments like this all the time and no one ever follows me up on them.

However, a few weeks back Blue got in touch to say that while he'd more or less finalised the arrangements for most of his songs, he still had a handful that weren't completely pinned down yet and if I wanted to see if I could add anything with my bouzouki to them he'd be interested to hear.

I played around with a few ideas, then met up with him to run through them.

This resulted in me heading out to Chris Lord's recording studio, near Thornhill, last week to lay down some bouzouki sequences - some picking, some strumming and some with bottleneck slide.

Although both Blue and Chris were complimentary about what I was producing, I'm fully prepared for all my bits to end up on the cutting room floor. I know from my recording experiences with Marcus for The Cracked Man that ideas can be enthusiastically recorded, only to be dumped later on when the mix starts being fine tuned.

Sometime over the next few months I'll find out if my stuff has survived the final cut and either I'll be loudly promoting Blue's new album, or quietly never mentioning it again...

Nevertheless, it was a fun afternoon, and also interesting to see how Chris had created a recording studio out of what was basically a converted garage - with one room for playing and the other for mixing.

Here are some photos from the day.


Chris at his mixing desk


Blue and Chris listening back


Blue took a shot of me in action...